Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Oil, gas and fracking Lincolnshire, part 2

Probably
best to read the previous post first (if you haven’t already).

A
great deal of what is being said and written about the issues surrounding fracking, dwell on the local issues of earthquakes, pollution of groundwater, lorry
movements, settlement ponds, and other
environmental problems that are essentially local in character. And that is just how the industry wants the
issue framed. Indeed that’s just how the
industry itself frames it. This is a screenshot
of the centre of the front page of Cuadrilla’s website:

The
one KEY ISSUE that the industry does not want us talking about is the one thing
that effects all of us, living and yet unborn, anywhere on the planet and in
everybody’s backyard. Greenhouse gas.

It’s
not rocket science.Fourier, Tyndall and
Arrhenius had worked it out in the 19th century.Add carbon dioxide or methane to the
atmosphere and the temperature of the planet will rise. The rest is detail.

This is the big one that the oil industry has no answer to.By concentrating on local issues of “Water,
Seismicity, Jobs,Traffic and Visual impact” they divert attention towards the
issues that they can, with varying degrees of success, argue about.

They cannot argue about the fact that
extracting gas from shale will add greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere. So they want us to keep talking about the
local issues.

1 Comments:

Yes, that is the key point, Biff. I don't doubt all those 'local' issues can more or less be acceptably managed. The additional emissions can not. Remember, we don't have the carbon budget to burn even half of the EXISTING PROVED fossil fuel reserves. Exploring for additional reserves is simply daft.